Puppet MastersS


Footprints

FBI Director Chris Wray resigns

Wray
© UnknownResigning FBI Director Christopher Wray
Before President-elect Donald Trump could say "You're Fired!" - FBI Director Christopher Wray has resigned, and will leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden's term.

Wray's decision comes weeks after Trump nominated Kash Patel as his replacement. Patel, a fierce critic of the FBI, has said he would seek to shrink the agency's power, close its Washington headquarters, fire its top ranks, and prosecute corrupt agents.

While Wray's departure was always in the cards, the move comes two days after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote an 11-page letter to Wray asking him to step down, accusing him of mismanagement and "failure to take control of the FBI." Grassley wrote:
"These failures are serious enough and their pattern widespread enough to have shattered my confidence in your leadership and the confidence and hope many others in Congress placed in you."
As the Epoch Times notes further, in November 2022, Grassley published FBI documents showing that higher-ranking officials were sometimes penalized less severely than subordinates.

Comment: The exodus has begun.


Rocket

Bitcoin skyrockets past $100,000

bitcoin
© heckepics/Getty ImagesBitcoin
The flagship cryptocurrency has been rallying on investor expectations of a pro-crypto Trump administration.

The price of Bitcoin has smashed the long-awaited $100,000 threshold as part of a rally fueled by investor expectations of crypto-friendly policies from US President-elect Donald Trump's administration.

The flagship cryptocurrency rose as high as $103,844 per coin late on Wednesday. It was trading at $103,173 on Thursday, up by more than 7% as of 14:54 GMT.

Bitcoin is now up more than 140% in 2024, with a significant part of these gains coming with the post-election rally.

At over $2 trillion, Bitcoin is now the seventh-largest financial asset by market capitalization, surpassing energy giant Saudi Aramco and moving closer to tech giants Amazon and Google. Overall, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies stood at around $3.8 trillion on Thursday, up by more than 131% in annual terms.

Chess

Trump invites Xi to his inauguration

Donald Trump Xi Jinping
© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/FileU.S. President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.
No Chinese leader has previously attended a US presidential inauguration

US President-elect Donald Trump has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration on January 20, CBS News reported on Wednesday.

The offer was made in early November, shortly after Trump's election victory, multiple sources told the media outlet. It remains unclear whether Xi has accepted.

In a recent NBC News interview, Trump said he "got along very well" with Xi and that they had communicated the previous week.

Comment: Trump's invitation could be seen as a reaching out to China to negotiate some sensible ground rules for economic competition (which beats war any day). Perhaps at that level Xi and Trump (and Putin) all understand that a general rapprochement must be undertaken slowly, and may eventually encompass Russia as well. Xi is currently not the level of demon the media has made Putin out to be.


Wolf

Pathological persistence: AG Letitia James says she won't drop civil fraud case against Trump

letitia james donald trump lawsuit new york fraud
© ABC News/Screenshot/Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty ImagesNew York Attorney General Letitia James said she will not drop the civil fraud case against President-elect Donald Trump.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said she will not drop the civil fraud case against President-elect Donald Trump as she waits for the appeal court decision, arguing presidents are not immune from civil litigation.

Trump and his attorneys demanded that James drop her civil fraud case against him, his family and his businesses "for the greater good of the country" last month.

Trump was ordered to pay a $454 million civil fraud judgment in James' lawsuit against him.

Comment: In keeping with the grand tradition of New York City corruption, James is a real piece of work:


Broom

FBI Director Wray announces resignation as Trump plans to replace him

Christopher Wray
© Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg via Getty ImagesChristopher Wray, director of the FBI, attends a meeting at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024.
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Wednesday he is resigning from the FBI, ending his term three years early after President-elect Donald Trump indicated he planned to replace him.

Wray, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, told employees during a bureau-wide town hall that his last day will be in January when President Joe Biden leaves office.

"This is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work," Wray said, according to his prepared remarks.

Comment: Christopher Wray on chopping block: Trump taps longtime ally Kash Patel to lead FBI

Vintage Patel:


Karma:





Bizarro Earth

Syria has collapsed like a house of cards - What's next?

militants assad banner syria
© KARAM AL-MASRI (EFE)Syrian rebels tear down a poster of Bashar al-Assad in the centre of Aleppo on Saturday, November 30, 2024.
"After 50 years of oppression under Baathist rule and 13 years of criminality, tyranny and displacement, and after a long struggle, confronting all sorts of occupation forces, we declare today, December 8, 2024, the end of that dark era and the start of a new era for Syria," - Islamists of the united Syrian opposition
What exactly happened?

The highlight of the international developments of the day was the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's power in Syria. Islamists and armed opposition forces entered Damascus. Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali said he was ready to "cooperate" with any administration chosen by the Syrian people and take any measures for a peaceful "transit" of power.

A hodgepodge of pro-Turkish fighters, jihadists, terrorists, armed pro-U.S. opposition and other elements occupied key cities of the country (including Homs and Palmyra) on the night of Dec. 8 and took Damascus with no resistance. Assad fled on an airplane, which disappeared from radar, thus giving rise to many versions about his fate. Against this background, government forces are withdrawing from the capital of the Republic. Damascus International Airport has also stopped its work. All employees have been evacuated from the air harbor.

Comment: The morbid upside is that Israel will find itself attempting to hold on to a large territory populated by normal Syrians who (gasp!) hate them. They just created a Gaza/West Bank situation orders of magnitude greater then what they have now. Israelis may be celebrating now, but things may look very different in six months or so.




Attention

Death of a nation: Black Flags, massacres, land grabs as vultures feed on the carcass of Syria

Good Terrorists
© Public Domain
The standard modus operandi of the Hegemon is always Divide and Rule. Cornered by the inexorable rise of the multi-nodal (italics mine) reality, they saw an opening for an imperial reboot, betting everything on establishing the "Greater Middle East" outlined still during the Cheney era.

The iron axis of Straussian neocons, Zio-cons and Old Testament psychos in Tel Aviv is no-holds-barred obsessed on destroying the Axis of Resistance, using their transnational network of bloody killers to extend chaos and sectarian civil war all across West Asia. Throughout this ideal scenario they dream of mortally hitting the head of the snake: Iran.

Sultan Erdogan, playing the role of useful patsy, has proclaimed:

A "bright period" for Syria has begun.

Indeed. A bright period for Black Flag head-choppers and Tel Aviv bombers and land grabbers - feeding on the carcass of Syria.

The Old Testament psycho-pathological killers, via over 350 strikes, have totally destroyed all the military infrastructure of the former Syrian Arab Army (SAA); weapons factories, munitions, bases, fighter jets, including the Mezze air base in Damascus, Russian anti-ship systems, ships themselves (in Lattakia, close to the Russian naval base) and air defense positions.

In a nutshell: this is the NATO/Israel combo demilitarizing the former Syria - with not as much as a peep from anybody in the Arab world and the lands of Islam, starting with the Black Flag killers that have taken Damascus.

Couple that with trademark land invasion/grabbing, and Tel Aviv officially declaring a definitive annexation of the Golan - which legally belongs to Syria and whose restitution has been demanded by the UN after the 1967 war.

Black Cat

Top Democrat on 'ethics' committee, Susan Wild, outed as leaker of Gaetz report

Susan Wild
Rep. Susan Wild (D - Penn)
Why is she still on the committee?

Rep. Susan Wild, the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee has been outed as the leaker of the Matt Gaetz report.

The House Ethics Committee was going to release a "damaging" report on Matt Gaetz last month, but because he resigned from Congress, the committee lost jurisdiction. The Democrats on the Committee fiercely worked to release the report amid damaging leaks.

Parts of the Gaetz report were selectively leaked to the media, and a 'hacker' also obtained a trove of documents from the 'damaging' report.

Whistle

Biden's paranoid pardons and leftist morality

biden
© UnknownUS President Joe Biden
Pardoner-in-Chief

Joe Biden has now established two precedents in presidential history.

First, he "pardoned" his own son Hunter.

No prior president has ever tried that shameless act, which is an affront to the entire hallowed notion of "equality under the law.".

Second, he did so in a way that no president has rarely, if ever, pardoned anyone.

Hunter, a convicted federal felon awaiting sentencing, was gifted by his father a blanket exemption from federal prosecution over the entire past decade (2014-2024).

Biden thus exempted Hunter from a series of much-discussed past criminal activities and provided further pardons for any federal criminal exposure occurring over the last ten years — yet to turn up.

Given the Biden suppression of the justice system and the media's complicity in hiding the Biden family's criminality, it is quite possible that in the next few years, disinterested prosecutors might finally expose Hunter Biden's long-suppressed, sordid career. And that could mean possible criminal exposure for three generations of Bidens.

Third, in the remaining waning 40 days of his now nonperforming presidency, Biden threatens to establish yet another presidential precedent. He contemplates issuing pardons to a variety of controversial cronies, bureaucrats, and officers — even though none of them have yet been indicted or even are under federal investigation.

Worse, Biden completed his shameless trifecta by breaking his serial pledge, voiced at least six times, and most prominently as a 2024 campaign plug, unequivocally not to pardon Hunter Biden. That performance-art braggadocio was serially greeted — by design — with glee in the media.

On spec, the vow supposedly contrasted Biden's "reverence for the rule of law" with a purportedly legally insubordinate Trump. Biden would put the law above family. Trump, in contrast, was supposedly chronically questioning the morality, fairness, and legality of his own five criminal and civil indictments over the campaign cycle — some of them (i.e., Bragg, Smith, Willis) demonstrably with the full knowledge of, if not coordinated by, the Biden White House.

Comment: Excellent analysis succinctly put. Pardoning? For criminals only. Biden's memoirs? Trash in, trash out.


Better Earth

Current developments in relation to the Taiwan issue

FlagsBanners
© Unknown
The development of the Taiwan issue, which remains one of the most serious challenges to global stability, has recently been marked by a number of notable events in the island's foreign and domestic policy alike.

The last months of 2024 have seen increased foreign policy activity by Taiwan's president and government, in line with the general course of the Democratic Progressive Party, which has been in power without interruption since 2016. Moreover, out of almost the two hundred countries in the world today (the basis for which status is their membership of the UN), only 12 recognize Taiwan as an equal. Of these, the largest are Guatemala and Paraguay (with populations of approximately 20 and 10 million respectively). The others are mostly tiny states, three of which (the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau), located in the Pacific Ocean basin, were visited by Taiwanese President William Lai on December 1 during a week-long tour.

Comment: Biden's 18th MIC contract to supply military equipment to Taiwan: Why wars never stop.